> But a big piece of the trouble is that if you take any given business model, chances are the artist can make at least trivially more money by exercising some of the control the copyright monopoly provides over the work. And if copyright exists, why not do that? The consequence is that most business models are seen to involve copyright, even if they would work very nearly as well without it.

In addition to that, there's the fact that a lot of the benefit to creators of a lack of copyright monopolies is the increased richness of source material to draw on for inspiration of new works. Don't make the mistake of thinking that I'm talking about "ripping off" existing material to make a fast buck, either. I'm talking about the fact that every creator is inspired to some extent by the works he or she consumes, but many works are not as easily accessible to the potential creators of the future, so that the inspirations that might arise after a creative person experiences a given existing work that is, unfortunately, never actually experienced by that person due to lack of legal distribution, simply never come to pass.

Then, of course, there's the fact that people have been so heavily indoctrinated by the propaganda of the copyright economy that people who have not yet made a name for themselves as creators of marketable works are convinced without any evidence apart from that indoctrination that their major problem in life is figuring out how to make money off of copyright, which to them by default involves appealing to a major distributor to publish their work. The truth of the matter, of course, is quite the opposite: the major problem in life for such a creator of marketable works is getting it into as many hands as possible. The biggest enemy of the common creative person is obscurity, not "free riders", "pirates", or whatever else people imagine would destroy their lives if not for the protectionist monopoly power of copyrights.

My experience, as a writer and programmer of mixed success, is that when people notice my work I have a difficult time stopping them from giving me money or otherwise offering me incentives to continue; when they don't notice my work, I can't get people to accept it for free. There is no hyperbole in hits. I have literally put together websites where I attempt to distribute materials for free, just because I think it's good and should be seen by more people. The result is that nobody notices for long periods of time, but then eventually people might start taking notice -- and when that happens, well, to use one recent example, someone actually tracked down one of my email addresses via intensive web searching then used PayPal to contribute money to me because they couldn't find any other way to pay me for work I had already given away to the world for free, using a license that generally mimics the conditions of a world without copyright, on a site where I specifically stated that circumstances made it legally inadvisable for me at that time to solicit any contributions for my work.

Honestly, I think the concession that people might make a little more money with copyright than without it is not only negligible, not only overcome by the unrelated benefits of a lack of restrictive copyright monopoly, but actually the opposite of how it would work in general.

In short . . .

> The argument is instead that the non-derivative content producers fail to experience a harm sufficient to outweigh the harm that copyright causes to the producers of derivative works and to consumers.

I think -- based not only on a more comprehensive overview of the economic effects of copyright than most people ever imagine, and not only on observation of what happens when people start working with business models that do not strictly rely on copyright (e.g. Radiohead, Humble Bundle, Kickstarter, Neil Gaiman, Amanda Fucking Palmer, Google, EnterpriseDB, and so on), but also on personal experience many times over -- that even just considering the direct effects on published, financially successful creators themselves the benefits outweigh the detriments, and when you add in those who are not yet so successful those benefits only increase.

Then, as you say, there's the matter of people other than the creators themselves. Except for push-marketing middlemen and lawyers, everyone gains. The real reason we don't see as many examples of this in action as we'd like is because the people whose propaganda makes up the majority of the argument are the push-marketing middlemen.